


These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right (The Maddening Loop Remix)

by Balder12



Series: These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bondage, Character Death, Community: kamikazeremix, Dubious Consent, Knifeplay, M/M, Unrequited Wincest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 01:38:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's in love with Lisa.  Sam's in love with Dean.  Castiel doesn't know whether he's in love with anyone.  He's just trying to make sure that at least one of his worlds doesn't end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right (The Maddening Loop Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [choosing my confessions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/368329) by [De_Nugis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis). 



> A/N: Title from "Country Feedback" by R.E.M. Same album, different cut.  
> A/N 2: Many thanks to nicole-sill, who acted as beta at the last possible second, and still offered great insights. Thanks also to the_diggler, who introduced us.  
> A/N 3 (angsty edition): I've never done a remix before, and I didn't plan for this to turn out as absurdly long as it did. It would certainly have been better if I'd had another month to work on it, or if I'd had the good sense to make it a reasonable length. Hopefully, it isn't completely unworthy of de_nugis's fantastic original.

The human world ebbs and flows through Castiel’s grace in unfiltered waves: A professor in Cambridge cleans his chalkboard. A tech support worker in Calcutta advises the caller to reboot his computer. Dean Winchester knocks on Lisa Braeden’s door in Battle Creek.  
  
The day on which Dean learns of Castiel’s deal with Crowley ends with the two of them face-to-face in Bobby’s inadequately angel-proofed living room, making half-veiled threats to kill each other. It’s the last time they speak for two years. In the end, Dean kills Raphael, instead, just before Castiel gets the chance to crack open Purgatory and do it himself.  
  
Dean doesn’t summon Castiel in the months that follow. No prayers for help, no demands for a reckoning. Just silence. Castiel doesn’t seek Dean out, either. If provoked, he could probably still get into a fight about whose behavior was worse, whose position was more inflexible, whose pain was more valid, but anger isn’t what keeps him away. Dean scares him as few things have in all his long life. It’s no small part of the reason that Castiel lied to Dean in the first place–he was too much of a coward to defy Dean to his face. So he puts off their next meeting, and waits for Dean to need him.  
  
And then Dean retires. One night, Dean’s there with Sam in the Impala, eating cheeseburgers and blasting rock music, and the next he’s gone. It’s a surgical strike, this disappearance, Dean neatly carved out of his own life and transplanted into another. The smell of his leather jacket, and his whiskey, and his skin, linger in the Impala for a few months, and then they, too, disappear.  
  
Castiel’s hope of forgiveness disappears with them. If Castiel shows up at Dean’s house in Battle Creek, he comes dragging the entire world of angels and demons behind him. He is himself the supernatural that Dean wants to escape. Retired, the only thing that Dean will ever need from Castiel again is his absence.  
  
Castiel allows himself to grieve, briefly, for the end of their friendship. Then he turns his eyes toward the smoldering ruins of Heaven. Even with Raphael gone, the civil war still rages. The danger to Earth is less grave without a charismatic leader for the faction supporting the Apocalypse, but the danger to Heaven is, in many ways, greater. Instead of two sides, the angels have split into a half dozen poorly conceived ideological parties, each bitterly opposed to all the others. They fight hand-to-hand in the streets of the celestial cities. Castiel struggles to unite under a single banner those that support allowing Earth to continue as an independent realm, but it feels exhausting and futile.  
  
+++++++++  
  
A girl in Seoul unbuttons her blouse in her boyfriend’s car. A drunk in Dublin sings Carrickfergus. Sam Winchester cries in a motel bathroom in Colorado.  
  
When Sam prays to him, Castiel is surprised. He’d parted with Sam on no better terms than he’d parted with Dean. The last time they’d spoken, Castiel had admitted that he’d raised Sam from Hell, and Sam had accused him of leaving his soul behind deliberately.  
  
Sam’s message is shaky and vague, and the sigils on his ribs make him hard to find, but Castiel is able to track him down using a device that he’d planted in the Impala–a gift from Crowley. When he arrives, Sam is slumped over the toilet, covered in blood that stinks of sulfur. Castiel’s first thought is that Sam has taken Dean’s absence badly. He started drinking demon blood the last time Dean was gone, after all.  
  
Sam squints at him, bleary-eyed and slurring like a drunk, and says, “Make it go away. Please, God. Take them.”  
  
Castiel just looks at him, confused about why he’s been summoned. “My clothes,” Sam says. “I didn’t drink, but I can’t . . .”  
  
Castiel suddenly understands. Sam’s clothes are soaked in demon blood as the result of some hunt, and he needs the temptation removed. This, Castiel can do. He approaches Sam carefully, as he would a timid dog. He’s rarely been this close to Sam before, and he’s surprised by how much, under the scent of blood and shame and vomit, Sam smells like Dean. It’s impossible to say if it’s the common DNA or the common lifestyle, but it touches Castiel, and gentles his hands. He almost wills Sam’s clothes away, but then he remembers that the last angel to use his powers on Sam was Lucifer, and decides that the last thing that Sam needs is a display of Castiel’s “mojo,” as Dean used to call it. He unfastens the buttons of Sam’s flannel shirt by hand as best he can, although he finds maneuvering the little plastic discs out of their fabric slots something of a challenge. He seldom does this with his own clothes, since he can simply renew them where they hang on his vessel or, when necessary, will them to disappear altogether.  
  
The shirt opens eventually, though, and Castiel pulls it off. The pants are easy by comparison. When Sam stands before him, naked except for his sad, sagging socks, Castiel balls up the clothes and takes them to a dumpster on the other side of town. On the way back to Sam’s motel, he snags a bottle of Patron Silver from a liquor store. He doesn’t know what Sam likes to drink, but he knows that humans rely on liquor to sustain them through dark times. Dean taught him that.  
  
When he returns, he hears the shower running. He pulls fresh clothes from Sam’s bag, and leaves the bottle next to them. He considers waiting for Sam, but a call comes in from one of his lieutenants, and he has to go. When he leaves, he doesn’t really expect to return.  
  
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A detective stares at a suitcase full of money in Newark. A child burns her hand on a stove in Tel Aviv. Sam Winchester stands in a parking lot in Pennsylvania and prays for help in finding Dean.  
  
Sam calls Castiel a few times in the months that follow, but Castiel never answers. Sam’s calls are petty, by Castiel’s lights: small-time demons doing what small-time demons have done since Lucifer invented sin, mostly. Castiel can’t be bothered. His world is burning. The cries of the dying rise up around him from all sides, until he wonders how much longer it will be until there’s no canon fodder left to kill. Angels don’t breed, and it isn’t as if God is around to make more.  
  
Assuming, of course, that God was ever around. Castiel doesn’t know if he believes that, anymore. In all the long history of Heaven, only four angels claimed to have seen God: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Lucifer. Two corrupt politicians, a con artist, and the devil himself. Castiel suspects that the whole concept of “God” was a power play, a way to convince the other angels to acquiesce to the dictatorship of those four. It’s the last thing that the tattered remains of his garrison needs to hear, though, so he keeps his theological doubts to himself.  
  
The call saying that Dean is missing is the first one that Castiel pays attention to. There’s little he can do, though. The sigils keep Castiel from locating Dean, and he doesn’t have a tracking device in Dean’s new vehicle. He has no answers, but if Sam’s concerned, then Castiel’s concerned, too. He comes as soon as he’s able to get away from the battle at hand, which proves to be a few days of human time.  
  
He finds the Impala in the parking lot of a hospital, and waits beside it. If Dean’s inside, Castiel’s not sure that he wants to go in. Death has made it clear to him that the Winchesters have used up their ration of divine intervention. No more healing, no more resurrections. If Dean has been seriously injured, Castiel doesn’t know whether he’ll have the willpower to let him suffer. He doesn’t know what will happen if he doesn’t.  
  
After a while, Castiel catches the smell of grave dirt, and smoke, and hospitals. It’s not exactly pleasant, but it’s reassuring and familiar. Castiel recognizes humans more readily by scent than by sight, and this is a combination that he associates with Dean. He looks around for the source and finds Sam walking towards him with his left arm bandaged, apparently otherwise unhurt.  
  
“Oh, God,” he says when he sees Castiel. “I totally forgot I called you. Sorry. I should’ve told you that I found Dean the other day. He’s okay. Nothing supernatural. More like he had an early-mid-life crisis and decided to rabbit for a day or two.” Sam drops his eyes. He looks waxen and wrung out. There’s obviously more to the story than that.  
  
“What happened to you?” Castiel asks.  
  
Sam looks genuinely confused, and maybe a little guilty. Castiel gestures toward the bandage on Sam’s arm, and Sam looks at it like he’d forgotten it was there. “Nothing. This freaky Victorian ghost jabbed me with a spindle, of all things. Totally unrelated. I’m fine.” He doesn’t seem fine. He seems a dozen steps away from falling face down on the pavement.  
  
They both lean against the car in uncomfortable silence, watching the seagulls pick apart the trash scattered across the parking lot in the gray morning light.  
  
“I’m going to get breakfast,” Sam says, finally. “Want to come?” He makes the invitation like it’s perfectly ordinary, like going to get breakfast is a thing they do. It’s not. Castiel can count on one hand the times that he’s been alone with Sam.  
  
He agrees, though. He can feel that Sam’s not done talking about what happened with Dean, and he wants to hear it. Sam gets a giant styrofoam box of takeout from the local diner, and Castiel gets a cup of pallid tea. He’s found that humans are more comfortable eating in front of him when he consumes something, too.  
  
They go back to Sam’s motel room. It has two beds, even though Dean hasn’t been around for the better part of a year. Sam chases his eggs around the styrofoam container half-heartedly, while Castiel sits across from him and sips his tea. He tastes the humid air of southern India, and the hands of the man who picked the leaves. He waits for Sam to start talking.  
  
“Dean’s still having flashbacks to Hell,” Sam says, finally. “Working construction doesn’t help. All those fucking tools, they remind him of . . . .” Sam just shakes his head. Castiel isn’t surprised to hear that Dean can’t outrun his past. None of them can.  
  
“He said a funny thing to me,” Sam goes on, in the face of Castiel’s silence. “He said, well, he implied, really, that maybe I was jealous that he didn’t have a wall in his head. That I envied him for remembering Hell.” Castiel still doesn’t say anything.  
  
“He’d been drinking.” Sam huffed. “I mean, more than usual. What he said . . . that’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s sick. No one would envy Hell.”  
  
There’s doubt in Sam’s voice. For an instant, Castiel hears it as an accusation, and he wonders how Sam could have guessed. He knows the terrible price that Sam paid–knows it better than Sam does himself–but he envies Sam for getting the chance to fix his mistakes before they spiraled beyond recovery. Sam’s world is still here, still whole: the dirty motel rooms and the rubbery scrambled eggs, the seagulls and the tea, they endure, in spite of Sam’s sins. Sam is free to come and go as he pleases in Dean’s house, tracking in grave dirt and demon blood, free to stand in the sunlight of Dean’s love and approval. Castiel’s world is ashes. Dean’s love for him is ashes. And the universe is fresh out of holes to jump into.  
  
Castiel is on the brink of a confession when Sam mutters, “Maybe I do,” and Castiel realizes that he’s talking about himself, after all. Which Castiel finds sincerely baffling. He can’t imagine why Sam would want to remember Hell.  
  
“It’s . . . the Wall’s not just inside my head,” Sam says, like he’s only now working it through. “It’s between me and him. There’s this big blank over 40 years of his life. We shared everything, since the day I was born, but we couldn’t share that, and it drove us apart. He spent longer down there than he has up here, and if I just understood . . . .”  
  
Sam jumps up, and starts pacing. Once he doesn’t have to make eye contact with Castiel the truth pours out, a faucet he can’t turn off. “If I understood, then I’d have something she never could, wouldn’t I? I could make him come back to me. I could win.”  
  
The last word is hardly out of Sam’s mouth before he blanches, horrified by what he’s just admitted to. But really, it’s not like Castiel didn’t know. Sam and Dean have quarreled like embittered lovers the entire time he’s known them. The only thing missing from their fights was the sex that should have followed. Besides, while it isn’t unheard of for the bond between soul mates to be entirely platonic, it’s rare. Castiel doesn’t care much. The obsession with sexual sin is one of the many things that he thinks the human authors of the Bible got wrong. They’re all three guilty of worse crimes than unconsummated incestuous lust.  
  
Castiel rises, not quite sure if he should go to Sam or not. “You know it wouldn’t work like that,” Castiel says. “If you tear down the Wall you’ll die, or go mad. That’s all. Hurting yourself won’t get you Dean. Not the way you want him.”  
  
Sam approaches him, gets up in his personal space, the way that Dean always accused Castiel of doing. He can see now why Dean didn’t like it. It’s overwhelming, it throws him off balance, although Sam isn’t really trying to be menacing. The look in his eyes is longing, not threat.  
  
“You’ve been to Hell,” Sam says, studying Castiel’s face like it’s a puzzle he can solve. “Twice. You pulled us both out.” They wince at the same time. “You tried, anyway,” Sam amends. “You know. You could tell me what it was like. You understand.” He’s backed Castiel against the wall. He’s barely an inch away, now.  
  
“If you know your brother at all, then you know that the last thing he wants is to be understood,” Castiel says, more bitterly than he intended.  
  
Sam presses his lips to Castiel’s, then, like he’s going to learn something valuable from his body. He tastes like artificial pancake syrup and sleep deprivation. He tastes like Dean. Castiel kisses back before he has time to think about what he’s doing.  
  
“What is this?” Castiel asks when he manages to break away. “Why do you want this?”  
  
Sam shakes his head, “I just need . . .” He doesn’t seem to know how to finish. “I just need.” It’s good enough for Castiel. He was created to be needed, created to serve, and it’s been a long time since anyone asked him for something that he knew how to give.  
  
He lets Sam push him down on the bed, lets him bite at his throat and claw at the buttons on his white shirt. Sam leans down and whispers hot against his ear, “I could tear it down. Any time. You couldn’t stop me. He couldn’t stop me. And then he’d have to come back, wouldn’t he? He’d have to stay and take care of me forever.”  
  
The words are hard, and dirty, and deliberately baiting. Hearing them, Castiel knows what it is that Sam needs. He flips them over, sends Sam sprawling onto his back, and starts to rip through the denim of his pants, casting them aside like they were tissue paper. “No,” he says, “I won’t let you destroy him. I won’t let you destroy yourself. I can stop you,” he says. “I’ll always stop you.” Sam relaxes under him. The words are a gift.  
  
Castiel lifts Sam’s legs over his shoulders and pushes into him with nothing but spit for lube, making him cry out in equal parts pain and pleasure. They thrash and pound into each other, Sam clawing at him spasmodically, raising welts on his back, until Castiel pins his arms over his head. Sam relaxes further into his grip, shuts his eyes and surrenders, head tipped back, and Castiel comes on the image. He didn’t last as long as he would have liked, but it’s been a while since he’s done this.  
  
When he comes back to himself, he realizes that Sam is still hard and unsatisfied beneath him. He slides out of him, and then slips down, until his knees hit the dusty motel carpet. He pulls Sam down the comforter by his knees until his cock is in a better position, and then he takes it in his mouth. Sam whines low in his throat and bucks up. Castiel likes this part best. He finds the sexual demands of his vessel alienating, and not entirely pleasant. Sam comes all too fast, and Castiel swallows him down, sucking gently until Sam’s shaken his way through his orgasm.  
  
They both collapse on the bed. After a minute, Sam starts to laugh. There’s a note of hysteria to it.  
  
“You always catch me at the worst times, you know that?” he says through choking breaths.  
  
“I don’t ‘catch’ you. You call me when I can be useful.” Sam looks embarrassed, which wasn’t what Castiel intended. Why else would anyone pray to angel, after all? He’s used to seeing humans at their worst.  
  
“You know, if there’s ever anything I can do . . .”  
  
Castiel cuts him off. “There isn’t.”  
  
They lapse back into silence.  
  
“So,” Sam begins again, “where’d you learn all that?”  
  
“Balthazar,” Castiel says. “We worked together closely.”  
  
“Oh,” says Sam, obviously uncomfortable, and drops it. There’s nothing like bringing up someone you murdered to cut short a line of questioning.  
  
A little more silence.  
  
“I’m going to take a shower,” Sam says, and makes an awkward break for the bathroom.  
  
Castiel is surprised that Sam took the Balthazar story at face value. It’s so patently ridiculous to him. Balthazar did have a taste for humans–although he’d experienced some difficulty maintaining his habit after “I’m Thor,” stopped being an effective pick up line–but angels had their own, more satisfying, means of union. Two angels having intercourse in vessels was rather like two humans having phone sex in the same room: physically possible, but highly unlikely.  
  
The truth is that all Castiel’s sexual skills, such as they are, come from Dean. Dean had been drunk, that first time, and torn up that Sam had run out on him after their fight with War. It hadn’t been all that different from this, really. They’d talked about Hell then, too.  
  
There was never really any decision. It just kept happening, in the backseat of the car, in alleyways, in the bathroom while Sam was asleep. Right up to the day that Dean ran off to make a murder-suicide pact with Michael. And then the end of the world intervened, and they’d gone their separate ways for a year. By the time they’d met up again, the moment had passed.  
  
Castiel hadn’t been entirely sorry that it was over. He’d still been relatively new to his vessel when they’d started, and he’d scarcely begun to have sexual feelings. He’d only known that he wanted something from Dean that he had no name for. When Dean offered sex, Castiel thought that maybe that was it. It wasn’t. Sometimes he’d enjoyed it, sometimes he’d found it unsettling, or dull, but for all mankind’s obsession with subject, as far as Castiel could tell, it really was just the repetitive and often disappointing physical act that it looked like to him when he’d watched it from afar.  
  
Sam comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, his long hair dripping. He looks surprised that Castiel is still there. He pulls on a pair of sweat pants, and collapses onto the bed, face down, without a word, like he’s going to fall asleep now, whether Castiel stays or not.  
  
Castiel hovers over Sam uneasily. He doesn’t want to be here anymore, but his conscience won’t let him go.  
  
“What?” Sam says, without opening his eyes.  
  
“When you and Dean learned of my plan to open Purgatory, I knew that I needed you both out of the way. There was a moment when, in my desperation, I considered breaking your Wall to make that happen.” No response. Sam’s eyes stay closed. Whatever kind of psychological meltdown he had in this room twenty minutes ago, he’s locked himself down tight again now.  
  
“Maybe you would have thanked me,” Castiel adds, pushing for a reaction.  
  
Sam doesn’t even flinch. “Maybe,” he says evenly. “Dean would have killed you, though.” Like he’s talking about the weather. No anger, no shock, no hurt. No forgiveness. Sam is as blank and flat as the wall in his head.  
  
So Castiel leaves.  
  
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A woman in a yellow waitress uniform sings a Katy Perry song to her baby in Salt Lake City. An American college student rolls a joint at a coffee shop in Amsterdam. Sam Winchester smiles at a butter sculpture of the Last Supper at a state fair in Wisconsin.  
  
Castiel doesn’t expect to hear from Sam, at least for a while. Sam calls two weeks later, though, saying something vague about “not an emergency” and “hanging out.” When Castiel arrives, Sam is inexplicably excited over a work of art carved into a dairy product.  
  
“I had to show it to someone,” Sam says. “It’s an almost mind-blowing vortex of art and material that dares the viewer to recall Marcel Duchamp.” Sam is obviously quoting some bit of his own culture that Castiel is unfamiliar with, but he’s grinning so big and so sincere that Castiel smiles back, anyway.  
  
When Castiel admits that he doesn’t understand the reference, Sam reacts as if Castiel had said that he’d never seen the Sistine Chapel: “You’ve never heard of the  _West Wing_?” he says. Sam has Castiel by the arm, and back to his motel room, in no time.  
  
Sam cues up the “butter sculpture” episode of the  _West Wing_  on his laptop, and sits down next to Castiel on the bed. He’s closer than he needs to be, his left arm bumping against Castiel’s right. Castiel has a hard time following what happens on screen. Angels have their own versions of painting and sculpture, music and poetry, but they have no concept of fiction. They can lie, of course, but they’ve never made lying an art. Castiel can’t understand why humans find the fates of imaginary people so compelling, and he can’t bring himself to forget that the faces on screen are merely actors reading lines.  
  
He focuses on Sam, instead. Over the course of the hour, Sam drifts closer, his head resting on Castiel’s shoulder, his hand on Castiel’s knee. Sam’s body is comforting in its weight and warmth. He smells like laundry detergent, and butter, and arousal. Castiel has trouble grasping human sexual overtures, but there are some so obvious that even he recognizes them. He never does find out how the episode ends.  
  
And that’s how it starts, really. Once might just be once; it might be something you do in a moment of need and confusion, and never speak of again. Twice is a pattern. Once it’s established, it keeps repeating.  
  
Sam has a thing for ropes, and belts, and knives. Especially knives. He likes to be tied down at all four points, gagged with Castiel’s tie, and hit until his pale skin is a raw, flushed crisscross of red stripes. He likes to be cut until the blood wells in elaborate patterns across his chest like ink. Sam gets to be free of the terrible burden of his own existence, and Castiel gets to be responsible for something that he can actually control.  
  
No. Reverse that. Sam isn’t surrendering power when he’s tied down, he’s taking it–their sexual games are governed by safe words, by ‘red light/yellow light/green light,’ by Sam’s needs and limits. Sam is claiming authority over his own body, which has been poisoned and twisted without his consent all his life, and Castiel is grateful to feel useful to someone again, even in such a strange act of service. He’s Sam’s tourniquet. When Sam’s psyche threatens to hemorrhage, Castiel is there to tie it off, to save him from himself. At least, that’s how Castiel explains it. Sam doesn’t explain it at all.  
  
They hunt together, when Castiel can spare the time. They spend odd hours in diners, and play Dean’s tattered cassettes in the Impala. Sam passes out in dangerous places after a night of drinking, and Castiel has to carry him home. Sometimes Sam cries after sex, just like Dean used to. Everything is different, and nothing has changed. The same tired routine, just smaller and paler, the second time around. The name on Sam’s lips when he comes is never ‘Castiel.’  
  
Castiel doesn’t know why he keeps coming back. Maybe it’s a gift to Dean, taking care of his lonely, broken brother, now that Dean seems to have exhausted the ability to do it himself. Maybe it’s penance, to serve as an unsatisfying stand-in for the man who cast him aside for his sins. Maybe it’s mercy, the only measure of absolution he can offer to Sam who, it seems, still can’t forgive himself, all these years after he’s been forgiven by everyone else.  
  
It’s not all bad. Sam is as bright and cheerful as a child the day he calls Castiel to join him at the Mall of America. Castiel loves stores of any kind for their role as museums to modern human life, and Sam seems to enjoy explaining the cultural background of the Pottery Barn, IKEA, and Abercrombie & Fitch. Castiel still doesn’t understand televison, but he likes lying next to Sam to watch the laptop. The look of joy Sam gets when the new season of  _Doctor Who_  starts is a small treasure.  
  
They’re lying on one of the two beds in Sam’s motel, watching a  _Law & Order_ marathon, when Castiel broaches a question that’s nagged at him since Dean retired. Sam has been watching the show with a degree of enthusiasm that he rarely shows for anything in his actual life, complaining that the legal explanations are unrealistic and shouting ‘objection!’ before the characters on screen can get out the word.  
  
“You wanted to be a lawyer once, didn’t you?” Castiel asks.  
  
Sam shrugs. A mask of apathy drops decisively over his face. Any unwarranted emotion that he might have allowed himself to reveal in relation to the TV show is gone now that he’s talking about himself.  
  
“A long time ago,” Sam says. Dean flattered himself that he was the strong, silent type, but he wasn’t. He’d never had an emotion that he didn’t project at a radius of 50 feet. Sam was different. He could hide the cracks in his psyche behind a pretense of bland normality, right up to the point where he was throwing up on the floor of a motel bathroom, covered in demon blood. Castiel found this wall of affable blankness more frightening than any breakdown. It was impossible to know what lay behind it.  
  
“There’s still time,” Castiel says. “You’re young yet, by modern standards. Your brother has retired. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t find a new career yourself.”  
  
“What would I do in suburbia?” Sam says. “Lie to another girl about my past? Make a bunch fake friends who’ll never know the first thing about me?” Sam swallows. “I don’t even like golf,” he says, but doesn’t quite pull off the light tone he was going for.  
  
“You do know that there are options besides being a drifter with no human contact, and living what you and Dean call the “apple pie life,” don’t you?” Castiel isn’t at all certain that Sam does. The Winchesters have narrow notions about what a human life is allowed to be. “There are 7 billion people on the planet, and most of their lives don’t fit into either of those categories.”  
  
Sam shakes his head. “Yeah, I know,” he says. “I like hunting. And, I don’t know, it keeps me busy. If I had an easier life, one that left me time to think, it wouldn’t be good. I might . . .” He trails off, and glances over at Castiel. “What about you? You ever think about retirement?”  
  
Yes, of course he does. He thinks about it every day. It would be so easy to give up, to crawl off under a rock somewhere and wait for his enemies to find him. “No,” he says. “Not while the war lasts. My people need me.”  
  
“Do they really?” Sam says. “I’ve been there, thinking I was the only one who could save the world. It didn’t end well for me. There’s always someone waiting to take your place. No offense but, I wish you’d get out before they kill you.”  
  
Castiel knows that Sam means well. Heaven isn’t quite real for him, even though he’s been there. Its destruction is a hypothetical, not a tragedy. Besides, Sam has little reason to grieve for the fate of Castiel’s species. They’ve treated his family like cattle for generations.  
  
“Maybe you’re right,” Castiel says. “Maybe there’s nothing I can do now to save my home that someone else couldn’t do better. But your world isn’t the one that’s ending anymore, is it? Lucifer didn’t burn the planet. Michael didn’t kill half the human population. You can retire if you want to because you fixed it. I haven’t been as successful as you were at walking back my sins.”  
  
Sam’s mask slips a little. He looks sad, and worried, and much older than a man under 30 ever should.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “God knows, I’m in no position to judge. And I’m not as sure as you are that I’ve walked back anything. Maybe we should both try to mind our own business for once in our lives.”  
  
Castiel can’t talk, so he just nods. Sam settles against his chest, and Castiel slips an arm around his waist. They watch the imaginary lawyers in silence.  
  
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A musician in New Orleans cleans his saxophone. A businessman in Taipei finds a post-it note on his front door that reads “goodbye.” Sam Winchester pushes a piece of red velvet wedding cake around his plate in Battle Creek.  
  
Castiel isn’t there when Sam tells Dean about their relationship. He isn’t even on the material plane. Sam, much to Castiel’s annoyance, doesn’t have the decency to look embarrassed when he announces it as a  _fait accompli_.  
  
“You might have told me that you were planning to tell him,” Castiel says.  
  
“It wasn’t a plan, for God’s sake,” Sam says. He seems genuinely surprised that Castiel is unhappy. “We were drinking, and it just kind of came out. No pun intended. He’s not mad, or anything. In fact, he asked me to ask you if you’d come to his wedding.”  
  
Sam looks at him earnestly, like a kid who’s presented his father with a good report card, and is waiting for his approval.  
  
“I see,” Castiel says, because he can’t immediately think of anything else. Sam is jealous of Dean’s attention, but he’s not unkind. He narrates to Castiel the details of every meeting they have. Sam tells him that Dean has learned to play racquetball, and that he made cupcakes for the school bake sale. He tells him that Dean was fired for getting into a fight with his supervisor, and that Lisa’s father is a drunk who calls at odd hours and makes her cry. If Dean had ever mentioned Castiel over the past year, he’s certain that Sam would have told him.  
  
“You’re coming, right?” Sam says. “He wants to see you. I know you want to see him. Besides,” he adds, when Castiel doesn’t answer quickly enough, “you can’t make me do this alone.”  
  
Castiel goes, of course. Dean asked for Castiel, and that in itself is enough for him to go anywhere. Besides, there’s Sam, whose tranquil indifference in the days leading up the wedding Castiel finds deeply unsettling. It seems best to keep an eye on him.  
  
Sam wears the suit that he uses to pass himself off as an FBI agent, and Castiel wears the same thing that he always wears. They could have just met up a Dean’s house–it’s not as if Castiel doesn’t know where it is–but they’re both overcome with a strange shyness, so they drive over together, instead. Strength in numbers.  
  
There’s a disorienting crowd of people in the house, spilling out onto the lawn. Castiel doesn’t realize that Sam is leading him toward Dean until they’re nearly on top of him. And then, suddenly, Dean’s there, dressed in a rented tuxedo that reeks of sour wine and other people, looking scared and excited. Castiel wants to say so many things, has rehearsed this meeting over and over again, but when he sees Dean in the flesh, all the words die on his tongue.  
  
He takes Dean in his arms, instead. Dean smells like construction sites and nervous sweat. He hasn’t been eating red meat, but there’s still whiskey in his pores and on his breath. Castiel resists the urge to grab Dean and shake him, to say, if you would just understand, please, why can’t you understand? He resists the urge to fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness. When he lets go, Dean looks at him and says, “It’s been a long time.”  
  
“Yes,” Castiel says. With what he considers an admirable exercise of restraint, he doesn’t cry.  
  
And then Dean is gone, led off by his new friends to get ready for the wedding. Sam takes Castiel by the arm, and guides him to their seats.  
  
The wedding is in the backyard. Sam stands next to Dean during the ceremony, looking proud and uncomfortable. It’s the first time that Castiel has seen Lisa. He absorbs little about her beyond the obvious fact that she’s two months pregnant with Dean’s daughter. As he sits in his folding chair, he wonders if they know, and whether he should tell them. He decides that if they aren’t aware of it yet, they probably don’t want to learn about it from him.  
  
The party afterward is awkward. The only person there that Castiel and Sam know is Bobby, who has a far more natural rapport with Dean’s fellow construction workers than they do. He’s led off by a pair of twenty-somethings with a bottle of Jim Beam early in the evening, and they don’t hear from him again the rest of the night.  
  
Sam makes a game effort at conversation, but he has nothing in common with Dean’s friends, let alone Lisa’s, and he has to lie every time they ask him a question. It’s even worse for Castiel. He finds large groups of humans difficult to deal with at the best of times. The species is genetically homogeneous, practically inbred, and it’s hard for him to distinguish one from another. He could pick Dean’s soul out from every other in creation without a moment’s trouble, but when he’d first seen Dean in his body, he’d only been able to tell him apart from Sam when they were standing next to each other. When he’d told Dean that later, Dean said it was racist.  
  
Castiel has gotten better since then–he can generally recognize a human after a single meeting, as long as he spends a little time with them, and gets a good sense of their scent–but a party is far too much information for him to handle effectively. He never has any idea who he’s talking to. He’s repeatedly shocked to discover that the person in front of him is someone entirely different from the one who’d been there a few minutes earlier.  
  
Finally, Castiel gives up on trying to pass himself off as human, and finds Sam sitting alone at a table on the edge of the circle of light. He seems to have abandoned the project of socialization, as well. Castiel sits down and watches Sam push a piece a wedding cake around his plate. Although he watches for several minutes, not a single bite goes into Sam’s mouth.  
  
Dean swings by their table a few times, and makes joking efforts to get Sam and Castiel to dance with each other. Sam huffs and rolls his eyes, playing the part of the put-upon little brother. Castiel is quiet. He and Dean didn’t part as friends, and he knows Dean too well to believe in such easy forgiveness. He saw this performance the first time around, when it was for Sam. Dean doesn’t want to be the kind of man who holds a grudge, but he is. Castiel watched Dean convince himself that he’d made peace with Sam half a dozen times, while the wound that would send him to Michael still festered beneath the surface. Dean didn’t truly forgive Sam until Sam went to Hell. Blood for blood. Castiel can’t offer Dean that. He doesn’t trust Dean’s smile for a second.  
  
Sam and Castiel end up eyeing the crowd warily from the relative safety of their place on the edges, whispering to each other like a pair of conspirators lurking outside a window.  
  
“Everyone is staring at us,” Sam says, and swigs his flat champagne.  
  
“That’s not true,” Castiel says, although he has no idea. He’s never been a good judge of what humans consider ‘staring.’  
  
“They are,” Sam says. “There’s, like, 50 people here, and we’re the only gay couple.”  
  
“You’re bisexual. And I have no gender.”  
  
“Yeah, well, your dick does.” Sam sighs. “I couldn’t even tell anyone what I do, or where I live. They’re all going to think of me as Dean’s weird, gay, hobo brother forever now. A gay hobo who’s dating the Rain Man.”  
  
“We’re not ‘dating.’” Castiel says. He thinks it’s a ridiculous term.  
  
“Yeah, I know, but you draw a lot of attention to yourself. People kept asking me how I knew you. I couldn’t very well say, ‘oh, yeah, he’s the fallen angel I’m non-monogamously fucking,’ could I?” A look of horror dawns on Sam’s face. “Please, please tell me you didn’t say anything like that to anyone.”  
  
“Of course I didn’t.” Castiel doesn’t understand the subtleties of modern American social mores, but he isn’t as entirely incompetent as Sam tends to assume. “When people asked, I said we were friends.”  
  
“‘ _Friends_?’” Sam sounds offended. Castiel has no idea why.  
  
“We are, aren’t we?”  
  
“Sure, but I told people we were together. I had to. Dean’s been telling people all day. I couldn’t stop him if I tried, with his stupid ‘catch the bouquet, Sammy.’ So now, I’m Dean’s weird, gay, hobo brother who’s dating a  _closeted_ Rain Man.” After a moment Sam adds, “No offense.”  
  
“None taken. When you say things about me that I don’t understand, I just assume they’re compliments. You compliment me a lot.”  
  
Sam smiles. “Seems like a good philosophy.”  
  
The sun was barely down, and the crowd showed no sign of dispersing. “When will it be socially acceptable for us to leave?” Castiel asks.  
  
“I’m the best man. I can’t take off this early. You can go if you want. I’ll say it was an emergency.”  
  
Leaving without Sam feels a little like abandoning someone in the middle of battle. “I’ll stay until you can go.”  
  
“Thanks. Believe me, I can’t wait to get out of here, either. This is literally the most uncomfortable social experience in the history of time itself.”  
  
“I doubt that,” Castiel says. “It’s not even the most uncomfortable social experience that I’ve personally had.”  
  
“Seriously? What was worse?” For the moment, Sam is more interested in Castiel than he is in the people who may or may not be staring at them.  
  
“About 20,000 years ago, I attended a meeting between two warring tribes that were trying to broker a peace agreement. As was common at the time, both cannibalized the dead. It turned out that the meal served by one side was made out of a close relative of the other. I’m fairly certain that those people were enjoying themselves even less than we are.”  
  
Sam laughs. “Dean’s wedding: slightly less bad than eating someone you know. Sounds about right.” He studies his empty champagne flute. “I think I need to be drunker.”  
  
“I think you don’t,” Castiel says. “I don’t know how to drive, and I can’t very well fly you out of here with people staring at us, so . . .”  
  
Sam cuts him off. “You said no one was staring.”  
  
“And you said they were. Besides, someone’s going to have to carry your brother upstairs, and I don’t believe that Lisa has the upper body strength to do it herself.”  
  
Sam laughs again, but Castiel isn’t joking. Dean is drinking steadily, his words a little more slurred each time he passes by them. By 10:30, he’s face down on one of the tables. Sam carries Dean to his bedroom ,while Castiel waits at the foot of the stairs.  
  
“Is he all right?” Castiel asks when Sam comes back down.  
  
“He woke up enough for me to give him a piece of bread and make him drink some water. I think he’ll live.” Sam shrugs. Nothing about this surprises him.  
  
“Did you turn him on his side?” Castiel asks.  
  
“I was doing this long before you showed up.” Sam sounds defensive, like Castiel questioned his hunting technique. “Anyway, the good news is, once the groom gets borderline alcohol poisoning, the party’s over. We can get the hell out of here.”  
  
There’s no real reason for Castiel to go back to Sam’s motel room, but he does, anyway. Sam seems glad enough to have the company.  
  
“You didn’t tell me he was still doing that,” Castiel says when he’s seated on the bed furthest from the door, watching Sam wearily undo his tie.  
  
“I didn’t tell you he’s still breathing, either,” Sam says. He lays the tie out on the table behind him. He’s always meticulous about his clothes.  
  
“I suppose I hoped that he’d get better when he was in a more stable environment.” Castiel has been hoping that Dean would get better since the day he clawed his way out of his grave.  
  
Sam starts unbuttoning his shirt. “You and me both. I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t work like that.” he hesitates. “They’re having a baby.”  
  
“I know,” Castiel says. Sam looks surprised. “I could smell it.”  
  
There’s a quick quirk to Sam’s lips that’s not quite a smile. “Of course you could. Anyway, I’m thinking, maybe being a dad will get him sober. Ish.”  
  
“Maybe,” Castiel says.  
  
Sam lapses into silence, apparently fascinated by his buttons. The shirt comes off. He folds it in a neat rectangle and sets it down next to his tie. He sits down on the other bed, facing Castiel, and unties his shoes. His hands shake a little, and he has to tug at the laces a few times before he finally undoes them. “He was happy to see you,” Sam says after a moment. “I’m sure of that. He’s missed you.”  
  
“He hasn’t mentioned me once in the past year.”  
  
“Yeah, that’s how I know. If Dean doesn’t talk about it, it’s important.” Sam studies his bare feet. He only owns one pair of dress shoes, and they’re too small. There are blisters on both of his little toes. He starts to stand again and then sinks back, like it’s too much effort. “Are you going to come back?” he says. “Christmas, maybe? Dean would like that.”  
  
Castiel suspects that it’s not Dean who’d like it. Sam has been shedding his composure with his clothes. He looks twitchy and wrung out, like the effort of pretending to be happy has drained him dry. Holidays with Dean and Lisa must be hard on him. If Castiel were there, at least they could feel uncomfortable and out of place together. But it’s not going to happen.  
  
Castiel has practical reasons for refusing to visit Battle Creek–he’s tangled up in the brutal politics of Heaven, and if anyone ever understood what Dean meant to him, he and his family would be easy targets for revenge. The truth, though, is that Castiel isn’t even tempted. He’d missed Dean far more when they were a dozen feet apart than he had when they were separated by a thousand miles. He wants to be with him, even now, the two of them talking the way that he and Sam are talking, or just sitting together in comfortable silence. He wants things to be the way they were before. But that isn’t going to happen, and the pain of being near Dean, knowing that it isn’t right between them, that their friendship is, at best, equivocal and diminished, is worse than not seeing him at all. At least through his absence Castiel can still serve Dean, however indirectly.  
  
“No,” Castiel says. “I’m glad I saw him, but it’s not safe for me to return. I drag the war behind me wherever I go.”  
  
Sam looks like he’s about to say something–an argument, maybe–but he checks himself. He strips off his pants and underwear, and then sets them down next to the rest of his clothes. He pulls a pair of sweat pants out of his duffel bag, but he doesn’t put them on. He just stands there with his head bowed, staring at them like he’s forgotten what clothes are for.  
  
“Can I ask you something?” Castiel says. Sam nods wearily. “When I tried to open Purgatory, I betrayed you as well as Dean. You have as much right as he does to be angry with me. More, perhaps, given what happened to your soul. And yet you never have been. Why is that?”  
  
Sam looks down at his sweat pants, and up at the black window. “That’s a good question,” he says, finally. “We weren’t as close as you and Dean were, back then, so I guess I never took it as personally as he did. And, well, I understood how someone in a bad situation could make a deal with a demon and think it was for the best, you know? I didn’t feel like I was in any position to judge.”  
  
Sam tosses the sweat pants back into the duffel bag, and sits down next to Castiel, sliding one arm around his waist beneath the trench coat. He leans in, and tilts his head so that his mouth presses against Castiel’s neck. He sucks lightly at the pulse there. His hand wanders up Castiel’s inner thigh. His hair is silken against Castiel’s mouth. It smells like charcoal smoke and mosquito repellant.  
  
Castiel has no response to the sight of a human body. He appreciates that Sam is beautiful, in the same way that he appreciates a sunset or a waterfall, but it doesn’t stir his sexual interest. Touch and smell are what move him. The feel of Sam’s lips traveling up his jaw, of Sam’s breath hot against his ear, the subtle shift in Sam’s skin as his capillaries dilate, the scent growing warmer and richer. He longs to yield to Sam, to lie back and entrust himself to these gentle and familiar hands, but he knows that’s not what Sam is after, especially tonight.  
  
“What do you need?” Castiel says.  
  
Sam doesn’t answer. He just stands and goes back to the duffel bag. He pulls out Ruby’s knife and offers it in his palm, handle out, a ritual gesture. Castiel accepts it.  
  
“Lie down,” he says. Sam does, legs straight, palms down. The ropes are under the bed, the same as always. Castiel passes them under the frame, since there are no bedposts, and ties them to Sam’s arms and legs. He feels Sam’s muscles relax a degree with each limb he binds, until he’s fully surrendered to the ropes, patient and waiting.  
  
Castiel sits down next to him, focused on keeping his presence calm and reassuring, like a doctor with a patient. He takes the knife and presses it carefully against Sam’s carotid artery, starting right where jaw meets throat. He traces the point downward along his neck, giving just the right pressure to sting without breaking the skin. The blade skims down Sam’s arms, into the soft fold at the elbow, along the pale blue veins at the wrist. He can hear Sam’s heart gathering speed, feel his pulse shaking the knife along the single point of contact. Sam’s breath is ragged, but he makes no sound, not yet.  
  
Castiel lifts the knife to Sam’s chest, slick now with a fine sheen of sweat, and drags it across from right to left, raising a tiny line of blood that beads slowly and trickles down. He does it again, a few more times, careful not to break the lines of Sam’s protective tattoo. He draws a meaningless pattern, twisting the tip of the knife when he changes directions. Sam whimpers and thrashes. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s trying to get away from the knife or press into it.  
  
Castiel swipes two fingers through the lines of blood, leaving a red smear, and brings them to Sam’s mouth. Sam sucks on them eagerly, like it’s the demon blood he doesn’t allow himself to have, anymore. Maybe it is, to a degree. There’s an edge of sulfur to Sam’s blood that waivers on the edge of imaginary. Castiel pulls his fingers out of Sam’s mouth and slides them down, brushing past his hard cock without touching it, going lower, and pressing inside. Sam’s breath catches and Castiel lowers his mouth to Sam’s chest, his tongue tracing the path of the cuts, lapping at the broken skin. He tastes rust and salt, adrenaline and chronic stress. He twists his fingers against Sam’s prostate like he twisted the knife in his flesh, and Sam howls. He always gets loud when he finally lets go, makes wild, animal sounds that have the neighbors pounding on the walls. Sometimes Castiel gets the feeling that sex for Sam is less a source of pleasure than an excuse to scream.  
  
Sam clenches around his fingers and comes, pulling at the ropes so hard that the bedframe creaks, and then sinks back, sweaty, bloody, and drained. Castiel unties him, and starts to rub the life back into Sam’s swollen wrist, but Sam catches his hand and sits up. He hooks his other arm around Castiel’s neck, drawing him in, and licks at the blood around Castiel’s mouth. Castiel tips his head a little, and parts his lips. Sam’s tongue slips inside, probing, still looking for blood, and his hands press Castiel backward, toward the mattress. Castiel is solid and grounded in his vessel, the flicker of desire in his belly intimate and familiar, not the alien intrusion it sometimes feels like.  
  
Then Sam’s grip tightens convulsively. “I’m getting blood on your shirt,” he says softly. It’s true. Sam’s entire chest is sticky with it, and the front of Castiel’s shirt is stained red. It’s gotten all over the sheets, too, spatters of crimson against the white. The damage to Sam is nothing, really, just a handful of messy scratches, but it looks much worse than it is, like they’ve just murdered someone in this bed. Sam’s breathing and heart rate have spiked. The Wall has spared him the Hell flashbacks that Dean suffers from, but he still has plenty of triggers. Whatever he’s seeing right now, it’s not a few teaspoons’ worth of his own blood.  
  
“I should clean those cuts,” Castiel says. He could will them away, if he wanted, could will away every sign of what they’ve done, but he’s reluctant to remind Sam that he isn’t human at times like this. Besides, he finds a secret pleasure in taking care of Sam. He doesn’t enjoy Sam’s suffering, but he cherishes the feeling that he is, however temporarily, essential. He frees himself gently from Sam’s grip, since Sam doesn’t seem able to let go, and steps into the bathroom. As soon as he’s out of sight he renews his shirt, and washes the blood from his face and hands. He grabs as many towels as he sees and comes back out.  
  
Sam looks a little calmer already. Castiel sits down next to him and wipes the blood from his chest as best he can. He disinfects the cuts and presses a clean towel against them until the bleeding stops. He has press down for some time. Sam’s a bleeder.  
  
“Someone who’s injured as often as you are ought to coagulate better than this,” Castiel says.  
  
“I’ll be sure to file that complaint with my genes,” Sam says. He’s come back from wherever he went, calm and steady again, at least on the surface.  
  
“You should sleep in the clean bed,” Castiel says, looking at the bloody sheets.  
  
Sam glances over at the bed closest to the door, and shakes his head. “I’m good here. Can you stay?”  
  
“For a little while.” Castiel shrugs off his coat and kicks off his shoes, but remains dressed, otherwise. He means to leave as soon as Sam’s asleep. Sam turns off the light and rolls onto his side. Castiel curls up behind him.  
  
After a bit, Sam’s hand wanders behind him and starts to fumble with Castiel’s zipper. “I could . . .” Sam murmurs. Castiel isn’t interested. Genuine sexual desire is still erratic and fleeting for him. It’s rare that his vessel and his true self fall into synch, and when they don’t, physical arousal is confusing, even disturbing. Now that he’s lost the thread, he won’t find it again tonight. He lifts Sam’s hand away.  
  
“I’m fine,” he says. “Try to sleep.”  
  
Sam sighs. After a moment, he takes Castiel’s right hand and presses it against his shoulder, on the same spot where Castiel once left his mark on Dean. Sam’s body relaxes the instant that the hand falls into place. Sam does this compulsively, like he misses a scar that he never had. There are times when Castiel wonders whether Sam isn’t wrong about what he wants from Dean, whether sex isn’t just a metaphor. He imagines the brothers as conjoined twins, one soul that ripped down the middle, but never quite succeeded in becoming two.  
  
Castiel lies still and listens to Sam’s breathing as it evens out into the familiar rhythm of sleep. He could leave now, but he doesn’t. He can feel Heaven with him, separated by a thousand veils, and as close as the pulse at his throat. It doesn’t exist in any physical direction, isn’t up in the sky, as primitive humans believed. It lies hidden behind the material world, always threatening to bleed through, as when the paint on a canvas flakes away, to reveal another image concealed beneath.  
  
When he shuts his eyes, he sees the grace of the surviving angels flickering against his eyelids like stars. There was a time when those stars burned infinitely various and bright in his mind, their voices constantly singing of their joys and troubles. Now they are few, and they give but little of themselves, when they give anything at all. He knows the day is coming when he will reach out to them and find only silence and the dark.  
  
Castiel is still caught off guard by the way that emotions express themselves through his vessel as physical pain. Loneliness, which until recently he had never known, sits on his chest like a crushing, black weight. The voices of 7 billion human souls rise up to meet him, but they’re grating and alien, and he finds no comfort there. He misses a home that no longer exists. He misses the quiet routine of life in the garrison. He misses the friends who’ve died. He misses Dean. He shuts his eyes and watches the stars go out, one by one.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A police officer in Singapore strikes a protester. A writer in Paris deletes the first line of his novel for the seventy-third time. Sam Winchester holds his three-day-old niece in Battle Creek.  
  
Angels have no natural sense of time. To Castiel, a week is a month is a year. Even the seasons give him little to go on, because Sam is constantly on the road. Winter might be hotter than fall, if he’s working a case in Florida. Summer might be colder than spring, if he happens to be in San Francisco. The only reliable signpost that Castiel has are the photographs of Dean’s daughter, Sally, that Sam shows him after every visit to Battle Creek. She grows larger at an alarming rate, although, for all Castiel knows, Sam could be showing him a picture of a different girl each time. He finds children even more indistinguishable than he finds adults. Dean is completely in love with her, Sam says. He sings her Metallica songs for lullabies and plays princess dress-up. He even throws out all his liquor when Sally turns one. He does it again when Sally turns two. The bottles always migrate back to their usual hiding places eventually.  
  
On Sam’s thirtieth birthday, he cuts off all his hair because he’s “a fucking grown up.” He pretends that it was a good decision for a week, and then admits that he hates it and grows it out again. He goes through a brief phase where he drinks PBR, which Castiel finds revolting, and a longer phase where he gets into microbrews, some of which Castiel likes, although he still prefers tequila. At one point, he talks a great deal about a band called “Wilco,” and at another, a band called “Grizzly Bear.” He makes an attempt to grow a beard that’s better not discussed.  
  
Castiel gradually learns the habit of dual consciousness necessary to understand fiction, and he and Sam spend countless nights lying on the bed with Sam’s laptop, watching  _Doctor Who_  and  _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_. Castiel even tries reading, which he finds more difficult than television. Sam’s favorite novel,  _To the Lighthouse_ , proves utterly incomprehensible, but Castiel falls rather in love with Shakespeare. He even successfully forces Sam to act out part of  _King Lear_  with him. There’s a good deal of tequila involved, on both sides.  
  
Somewhere along the way, Sam realizes that Castiel’s knowledge of music is centuries out of date, and that he considers all of Sam’s carefully curated playlists so much noise. They spend the better part of a day together as Sam works through his iTunes account, trying to find something that Castiel will enjoy. Hours of searching only score a single find:  _Kind of Blue_  by Miles Davis. “Great,” Sam says, “now all you need is a beret and a pack of clove cigarettes.” Castiel doesn’t know what that means, but he takes to slipping invisibly into jazz clubs, as he’s done for centuries in concert halls.  
  
Castiel tells Sam stories about hiding in the individual heavens of the great composers to listen to their work. He likes Bach, especially. The mathematical precision appeals to his sense of order. He’s never been certain whether he likes Beethoven or not–his compositions are primally unsettling–but he’s gone back time and again, trying to decide. He is, perhaps, the only being in Creation to have heard a performance of Beethoven’s Twelfth Symphony. Sam is delighted, and suggests that one day, when he reaches Heaven, they could go there together. Castiel doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the entire metaphysical region was wiped out by a splinter group. He sneaks Sam into a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the New York Philharmonic, and feels a little better.  
  
Most of the time, Sam seems fine. He seems fine when he’s planning hunts. He seems fine when he’s cleaning guns and sharpening knives. He seems fine when he’s watching  _Babylon 5_  on his laptop with Castiel. He seems fine when he says he’s been to visit Dean, and shows off pictures of his niece. He seems fine when he forgets to eat for so long that he passes out while driving 70 miles an hour on the freeway. He seems fine when he hasn’t gotten out of bed for a week. Whatever the mad yearning is that lurks inside Sam, he hides it behind a veil of quiet reasonableness so perfectly that Castiel is at a loss to know whether Sam’s getting better, or worse, or just living the same wretched cycle of despair and recovery over and over again.  
  
The only time that Sam allows a glimpse of his inner life to break through is during sex. Sam always comes back from his visits with Dean shaken and exhausted, begging to be tied down, to be hit, to be cut, to be hurt. Some nights, Sam comes bouncing up afterwards, cheerful and unburdened, like he’s been given a gift. Some nights, he looks more broken and miserable than he did before. Some nights, nothing changes at all. Castiel can remember Sam’s time in Hell, even if Sam can’t, and he doesn’t think that Sam deserves to bleed any more than he already has. But Sam insists that this is what he needs, and it’s not like Castiel would know, one way or the other. Everyone that he could have asked is dead.  
  
Castiel never does make sense of his own sexuality. He feels the nagging itch of desire when Sam sinks down against him while they’re watching TV, or when a half dozen college girls press in around him at a bus stop, or when the green-eyed boy at the coffee shop brushes his hand while giving him a cup of tea. He just doesn’t know how to scratch it. There are nights when everything falls into place, but they remain exceptions, enigmatic and unreproducible.  
  
One night, when he and Sam are watching the laptop, Sam glances over at Castiel and says, “I turned 33 today.”  
  
“Happy birthday,” Castiel says. It comes out sounding more like a question than he intended. He’s still unclear how he’s supposed to react to these sorts of human holidays.  
  
“Do you realize that means it’s been four years that we’ve . . . ?” Sam gestures vaguely at the two of them. They still don’t have a word for what this is. “Isn’t that weird?”  
  
Castiel is hundreds of millions of years old. He has no idea whether four years is a lot or a little in human terms. “Yes?” he hazards.  
  
Sam’s lips twitch, but he doesn’t say anything. They both go back to watching  _Lost_.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A pickpocket in Florence lifts a bus passenger’s rent money. A barrister in Abuja straightens his wig. Dean Winchester lies in the back of his truck in Battle Creek, eight shots into a bottle of whiskey, and prays for an angel to kick his brother’s ass.  
  
“Dear Cas: your girlfriend is acting like a little bitch. You damn well better get your smite on, and drag his whiny, self-righteous ass back here so I can knock some sense into him. Amen.”  
  
Dean drains a couple of fingers from the bottle, and stares up at the sky. There are no stars, just clouds heavy and swollen with unfallen snow. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you,” he adds, quieter now, “but he hasn’t been home in six months. He didn’t come for Christmas. I mean, he didn’t even call to say he couldn’t make it, he just didn’t fucking show. I called him and told him that’s the kind of shit Dad used to pull, and he said he isn’t coming around anymore. He says it’s ‘for my own good.’ Fuck him. I can’t do this alone.” Dean slams the bottle against the truck bed for emphasis. “I can’t. I won’t.” His voice breaks. “I try so goddamn hard, every single day of my worthless life. I need Sam. I need . . .” Dean trails off. “Everybody leaves me,” he mutters, more to himself than to whoever may be listening. “Just bring him home,” he says aloud. “And bring yourself home, too, maybe, because I . . . . Whatever. Amen again.”  
  
Castiel receives the message just after killing a spy he’d discovered in the ranks. He hadn’t been close to the angel, but it had been one of the few left that he knew at all. Angels as old as Castiel are rare in Heaven now. The brave ones are dead, and the smart ones have scattered like roaches when the light comes on, hidden among an infinite number of alternate universes. Castiel prefers not to consider what that says about himself.  
  
The remaining population is so young that many of them can’t remember a time before the fall of Lucifer, a time when Heaven was more than a military barracks, and angels were more than soldiers. His followers are gathered around him now, these young ones whose names he’s never bothered to learn, staring at him expectantly. It worries him. His garrison had loved and respected him, but these people only fear him. They don’t come to him with a problem unless it’s dire.  
  
‘What is it?” he asks.  
  
There’s shuffling among the crowd, as if none of them wants to take responsibility for delivering the news, and then one of them steps forward. “It’s Abdiel,” the angel says. “He went missing while he was on patrol near the human sectors.”  
  
“He probably deserted,” Castiel says. “Why do you care?”  
  
There’s a long silence, and the angels look at each other. Someone has to shove their appointed speaker from behind before he starts talking again.  
  
“We think they killed him. Sir.”  
  
“Which ‘they’?” There are so many options.  
  
There’s another silence. “The humans,” the speaker says, finally.  
  
That explains why they’re scared. The ranks of the angels have dwindled to a pitiful remnant, and the walls that kept their human charges isolated and passive for eons have begun to break down. One human soul is no more dangerous to an angel than an ant is to a man, but there are a hundred billion. When the humans realize their own power, they’ll rise like a flood tide, and wash away every angel foolish or unfortunate enough to remain in Heaven. It is, truly, the end of the world.  
  
“Good for them,” Castiel says, and walks out to deal with his own humans, instead.  
  
He hits the material world at full speed. Reality flips inside out, like the twist in a Mobius strip, and he’s struck by the blinding glare of physical light, the jagged edge of cold air, the chaotic roar of the cars on the highway behind him. There’ve been times when he thought that he preferred Earth to Heaven, but entering it too fast still feels like walking straight into a thousand knives. Which is exactly what he wants.  
  
When he’s reoriented, he finds himself standing next to the Impala. Sam’s digging around in the trunk, putting all his weapons back into perfect, gleaming order. Sam glances up at the sound of wings, and smiles. “Oh, hey, Cas. What brings you around?”  
  
“I got a call from Dean.” Sam’s face falls. He’d probably figured that, given Castiel’s dubious grasp of time, he’d be able to avoid Dean for years before Castiel noticed that anything was amiss. “I didn’t talk to him. I thought it was best that I come to you first.”  
  
Sam scrubs his face with his hand, avoiding eye contact. “I appreciate that. And I know Dean’s pissed, but . . .”  
  
“Dean’s  _hurt_ ,” Castiel says. His voice rises sharply on ‘hurt’ in a way that he didn’t intend. He’s had to listen to so many prayers from Dean over the years, prayers for help that never came, prayers for this cup to pass from him, prayers that sounded like thinly veiled pleas for death. He listened to Dean scream for help for thirty years, once. He listened to him stop. Castiel had been so proud of himself when he pulled Dean out of Hell, but now he thinks that he was a fool not to see it for the disaster that it was. If Castiel had only fought harder, if he’d only gotten there sooner, they would all three have been spared so many horrors. Castiel is so, so tired of hearing Dean suffer.  
  
Sam glances around the empty parking lot as if it conceals a crowd of eyes. “Let’s take this inside.”  
  
Castiel nods and follows him into the motel room, dark as a cave compared to the stark winter light.  
  
“Why are you doing this?” Castiel demands when they’re in the room. He just manages to avoid adding ‘to me,’ but it hangs in the air. If Sam can’t get better–won’t get better, whispers a voice in the back of his head, because some days it feels to Castiel like Sam is being miserable just to spite him–then at least he can stay in the holding pattern they’ve established over the past four years.  
  
“I’m a hunter,” Sam says, like Castiel’s being willfully dense. “Dean’s got a three year old daughter, and I’m not exactly family-friendly. I’m not going be responsible for dragging some little kid into the incredible shit storm that is my life.” Sam sighs. “Dean shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this in the first place. It’s not your business.”  
  
“Of course it is. You and Dean are my business. Besides, historically, dissension between you has damaged more than yourselves.”  
  
“That’s bullshit, Cas,” says Sam. “This is a difference of opinion, not some apocalyptic standoff.” And maybe Sam’s right, maybe there’s no literal apocalypse lurking around the corner this time. But for Castiel there isn’t much difference between the fate of the Earth and the fate of the Winchesters, and he knows that splitting up Sam and Dean can only end in disaster. He needs at least one of his worlds not to be ending right now.  
  
Sam’s pacing the way he does when he’s getting wound up for a good argument, brow furrowed in thought like he’s working on a mathematical proof, like there’s a magical combination of words that will prove to everyone that he’s right forever. His presence is somewhere between a college professor and a caged tiger. He passes a little closer to Castiel with each turn.  
  
“You of all people must know I'm right on this one,” Sam says, straining to sound reasonable. “You know what could happen. You know better than I do. I wrecked Dean’s family once before, remember?” He glances over at Castiel to see how that landed. Apparently not as well as he’d hoped, because after a moment he adds, “Not that I can. Remember, that is. Safe behind the fucking Wall with the rest of my soulless spree.”  
  
Sam knows how to twist the knife when he wants to. Another failed rescue. Castiel raised two brothers from Hell, and he didn’t save either one.  
  
“I know what I did,” Castiel says. “And I’ve spent the past five years trying to fix it. I’ve stayed away from Dean. I’ve done everything in my power to make sure that you don’t have to. For both your sakes. Dean needs you. You’re going home to Battle Creek. Now.” Castiel suddenly, overwhelmingly needs to fix Sam and Dean’s lives in this one small respect. The fact that Sam is fighting so hard just proves that it’s important. Dean fought the whole way out of Hell.  
  
Sam steps in close, until his palm rests on Castiel’s chest. His voice is low and dangerous. “This isn’t about you. I’m not going back there and putting my family in danger again just because I’m how you get your vicarious Dean kicks.”  
  
It’s the first time that either of them has acknowledged the ghost in their bed. Castiel gives Sam’s wrist a sharp twist and lifts it away. “I think you’ve got that backwards. And your relationship with Dean is absolutely about me. You’ve spent the past four years conducting it primarily through my genitals.”  
  
Sam almost smiles at that retort, a quick twist of the lips that rises to the surface and then disappears again instantly in the rolling boil of his anger. “Maybe,” he concedes, “but so what? You think I owe you because you did me the honor of fucking me?”  
  
Sam tries to pull his hand away, but he can’t break Castiel’s grip. He slams his other hand down against the wall next to Castiel’s head. He’s flush with Castiel now from shoulder to hip, and his skin is hot. Castiel doesn’t want to react, but the physical contact and the smell of Sam’s sweat flips switches in his vessel that he can’t control. He wonders if Sam’s doing it on purpose.  
“If you insist on thinking of it that way,” Castiel says. “We have an understanding. You use me as a firewall when your self-control fails. You use me so that you can be with him and never cross the lines that you’ve laid out for yourself. Fine. Use me. But find a way to make it work.”  
  
Sam’s practically on top of him now, the two of them sharing breath. Castiel wants to throw Sam through the wall. He wants to fuck him into the mattress. Yesterday he hadn’t even known that those desires could coexist, but his stolen body is feeding back an overload of adrenaline, and rage, and lust that his mind can’t sort into anything manageable. He’s hurt Sam a thousand times during sex, but this is the first time that he’s actually wanted to.  
  
“You don't give me orders,” Sam says, quieter, with focused intensity. It always comes back to this for Sam, as reliably as it always comes back to Dean. Tell him you want him to be happy, and he’ll break his own heart, just to prove that you’re not the one calling the shots.  
  
“It’s not an order. I’m asking,” Castiel says. “Don’t do this right now. Please.” He hears the echo of a long ago argument with Dean–I do everything that you ask, I always come when you call–except that this time around it feels even more futile. At least his relationship with Dean had allowed for the possibility that Castiel might ask for something. His relationship with Sam doesn’t. They don’t have a relationship at all, really. Only a deal that Castiel just broke.  
  
There’s a beat of silence where Sam stops, stunned, and Castiel dares to hope that this time will be different. Then Sam pushes him away, hard. It’s impossible to tell if it’s because he thinks he’s being manipulated or because he knows that he isn’t. Castiel doesn’t care. He keeps hold of Sam’s wrist as he stumbles back, knocking him into the bedside table. It goes over with a crash of splintering wood and the dull crunch of a lightbulb against the carpet.  
  
He lands on top of Sam, hand falling hard into the broken glass, a jagged shard sticking out of the base of his thumb until he brushes it away, his blood one more stain against the filthy carpet.  
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Sam demands, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. He’s already grappling with the button on Castiel’s pants, shoving them down past his hips. When Castiel’s cock bobs out, sticky and flushed, Sam looks up at him like he’s proven a point, although Castiel will be damned if he knows what it is. He tears Sam’s jeans out of the way, tugging until they’re tangled around his knees, but Sam’s still playing this like it’s a fight, like sex is one more thing for him to win, and levers up and tries to flip Castiel onto his back.  
  
And that’s it, Castiel’s tottering balance of lust, and rage, and grief goes tumbling over decisively into rage. He grabs Sam by the throat and squeezes until he chokes. “Stop it,” he hisses. “Stay still. Do as you’re told.”  
  
Sam goes lax under him, finally surrendering, and Castiel ruts against inner groove of his thigh. It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but Castiel’s too frantic and uncoordinated to do anything more. Sam’s hand edges up unsteadily, and lands on the small of Castiel’s back, weirdly gentle. Castiel comes blindingly hard, the rising waves of orgasm and anger cresting together, and ebbing away.  
  
He releases Sam’s throat. Sam gasps, gulping down air. There are red lines on his neck where Castiel’s fingers clamped down. Castiel is ready for Sam to be outraged, or traumatized–he’d be entitled to either reaction–but he only seems mildly surprised. Sam shifts his hips against Castiel’s thigh pointedly. He’s still hard. Castiel knows that he ought to be grateful that he hasn’t done something else irretrievably terrible, but mostly he’s annoyed. Sam is fundamentally unknowable. It’s impossible to predict what will wreck him, and what he’ll take in stride. He’s spent the past four years mourning over his sexual frustration like it’s a cosmic tragedy, but thirty seconds after almost getting fucked to death he’s completely fine.  
  
“In the time since you raised Lucifer,” Castiel says, “I’ve killed three hundred and forty angels with my own hands. Everyone I’ve ever known is dead, except for you and Dean. And they died for nothing. That’s what’s wrong with me.” He doesn’t blame Sam for what’s happening in Heaven. Not really. He let Sam out of his cage before Sam let Lucifer out of his, and unlike Sam, Castiel had known exactly what he was doing. It’d taken a lot less than thirty years on Heaven’s rack to get him to fold. Still, it’s a relief to feel angry at someone else for a change.  
  
“What the hell do you want from me?” Sam asks, his voice still ragged. “If you need help, if there’s anything I can do, you just have to ask. I’ve been telling you that for years.”  
  
Castiel shakes his head. “What I want from you is for you not to destroy yourself and your brother. You have your world, you have your home, you have Dean. All you have to do to keep them is nothing. For once in your life, just let it be.”  
  
He rolls off of Sam, flat onto his back, and they lie next to each other. They’re still touching, Sam’s left side pressed against Castiel’s right. The world that’s living and the world that’s dying, separated by a membrane as thin as skin.  
  
Castiel tips his head back, and gazes upside down at the orange light of late afternoon falling through the window behind him. Light in the material world is so strange. It’s a particle. It’s a wave. He never could decide.  
  
Sam watches him warily. “Truce?” he asks.  
  
“Truce,” Castiel says, without looking away from the window. “Maybe it was a mistake for me to get involved. But I still believe that you should go home. You will eventually, anyway. You always do, every time you try to leave. Even without your soul, you still went back. You should accept what you can’t change.”  
  
Sam sighs. “You’re one to talk. And it’s not my home. And I don’t want to argue about it anymore right now.”  
  
Castiel nods a little. Maybe they’ll fight again later. He can’t think that far ahead. He can’t even really imagine a future in which he gets up off this carpet.  
  
“It’ll work out,” Sam says after a while, when Castiel shows no interest in talking. “I swear to God, I know you don’t believe it, but it’s going to be okay.”  
  
Sam sounds so sure, and something in Castiel cracks right down the middle. He laughs. He laughs and laughs, until his throat aches and his chest burns. Sam didn’t look scared when he was getting choked, but he looks scared now.  
  
“You always catch me at the worst times,” Castiel says when he recovers his breath, but Sam doesn’t get it.  
  
“Do either of us really have good times?” Sam asks. He sits up and looks around the room. “I guess we kind of trashed this place.”  
  
“I can fix it,” Castiel says immediately, because he can. It’s a mission, however small. It’s a reason to get up. You don’t survive for millions of years without becoming an expert in finding reasons to get up.  
  
Sam stands and holds out his hand. It’s entirely unnecessary, but Castiel takes it anyway, and lets Sam help him to his feet.  
  
“You’ll want to take a shower,” Castiel says. “I’ll clean this, and order a pizza. Perhaps I’ll find the next episode of that show with the space ships you like so much.” He’s done these things hundreds of times over the last four years.  
  
“That description doesn’t really narrow it down,” Sam says with a smile. Sam somehow remembers to count out exact change before he disappears into the bathroom. Hand Castiel a billfold, and he’ll give the whole thing away. He doesn’t understand money any better than he understands time.  
  
Castiel could simply will the room back into order, but that wouldn’t take long enough. He does it by hand, instead, righting the table, and then hunting in the carpet for the slivers of glass from the broken light bulb. He focuses himself on the here and now, on accomplishing the task before him mindfully. He’s a being cleaning a motel room; he’s a being ordering pizza. He’d once lived his whole life this way.  
  
By the time Sam comes back out, Castiel has walked himself back from the edge. He feels calm and empty. He and Sam end up lying together on the bed furthest from the door, watching whatever show it is that they’re on right now. There are spaceships, but Sam’s right: that doesn’t really narrow it down. Half of Sam’s shows, and movies, and novels, are set in some distant future. Sam holds on to science fiction the way that other people hold on to religion. It promises that the human race will still be here hundreds of years from now, still be growing, changing, learning. It promises that tomorrow will be better, or at least different.  
  
Sam drifts closer, his body still warm and sweet from the shower. His damp head rests on Castiel’s shoulder, his hand on Castiel’s knee. This, too, is familiar. Sam smells like cheap motel shampoo. He tips his head a fraction and starts to kiss Castiel’s neck. His hand slides fondly under the open collar of Castiel’s shirt. It feels reassuring and comfortable, but even the thought of doing something about it, of having to get up off this bed, feels like climbing a mountain.  
  
Sam peers up at him. “What do you need?” he asks. Castiel’s first thought is that he’s being mocked. Then he realizes that Sam means it, and has a moment of panic. He has no idea how to answer. Sam lowers his eyes and goes back to kissing his neck, giving him time to respond, maybe giving him the option not to. Castiel almost doesn’t say anything, but he knows that Sam will take his silence as a rejection, and that’s not how he means it. So he tries.  
  
“This,” he says, finally. “Can we just . . . like this.” Sam nods against his throat, and pulls himself more fully against Castiel. They touch each other slowly, drowsy and soft, and Castiel feels sheltered by the weight of Sam’s hands and the press of his mouth. It doesn’t change anything–the world’s still ending, Sam and Dean are still broken, Castiel still doesn’t know what to do about any of it–but at least, for once, there are only two people in the room.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A fisherman in Crete teaches his son to mend the nets. A ballerina in Moscow examines her bleeding feet, and then rises, to dance again. Sam Winchester pulls on a wishbone with a little girl in Battle Creek.  
  
Sam was right. There were no dire consequences to his boycott of family life. Castiel was right. Sam couldn’t stay away from Dean forever. Maybe if he’d never looked back after Stanford, he might have escaped his brother’s gravity. Maybe that would’ve been better for everyone. But it’s far too late for that, now, and it’s less than a year after Castiel and Sam destroyed a motel room that Sam goes home for Thanksgiving. Castiel didn’t have to say a thing.  
  
Castiel doesn’t say a thing afterward, either, not “Good for you,” and not “I told you so,” although he briefly considers both. He’s starting to realize, rather late for a billion year old, multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent, that sometimes the best way to get what he wants is to shut up and let nature take its course. Giving orders to beings as contrary as humans has a tendency to backfire.  
  
Sam tells him about the holiday–how Dean massacred the turkey when he tried to carve it, how Dean almost set the kitchen on fire trying to bake a pumpkin pie, how Sally gave the hand print turkey she made at preschool to Sam. These details mean little to Castiel, who has no context for “Thanksgiving,” but he gleans that Dean is happy, and that’s good. When Sam pulls the hand print turkey out of the Impala’s glove box, he smiles, looking younger than he has in ages, and that’s good, too.  
  
In the weeks that follow, Sam starts looking at the web page for the University of Michigan’s law school, and googles rent prices in Ann Arbor. Sam says that he doesn’t know what he wants, that he’s just thinking, but Castiel can feel that something fundamental has changed. Sam is still hunting, but his heart isn’t in it, anymore. He’s getting ready to turn the page on this chapter of his life.  
  
When Castiel asks, Sam admits that Dean had not-quite-asked him to retire. Castiel just nods. He’s caught off guard by how much the prospect of losing Sam hurts him. He’s come to rely on the comfort of Sam’s body bound under his, of regular calls for help that he actually knows how to give, of curling up on a hotel bed with Sam and his laptop. He feels something perilously close to fear at the thought of living without it, of having nothing left but the tattered remnants of Heaven.  
  
He doesn’t flinch, though, not where Sam can see it. This is what he told Sam to do five years ago, after all. If Sam has finally forgiven himself enough to move on, then Castiel can ignore the ugly, selfish part of himself that wants to say you can’t leave, you need me. It would be cruel to keep Sam with him by playing on his weaknesses, even were it possible.  
  
Besides, it’s not true that Sam needs him, and they both know it. Maybe it was, once, when this started, maybe Sam had needed someone to hold him down, hold him back, keep him from acting on the thousand dangerous impulses that surged through his veins. But he seems better now, more centered and stable, as far as Castiel has ever been able to judge such things when it comes to Sam. He has a right to start living again. Castiel does his best to make peace with that, because the worst thing that he can imagine is to part with another Winchester in bitterness, to live knowing that he’d left behind a new set of unspoken words and unhealed wounds. This was what he’d chosen, after all. The thing about being someone’s tourniquet is that you only get to hold onto him until the bleeding stops.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
A boy burns with malarial fever in Nairobi. A sparrow falls to the ground in London. Sam Winchester is pinned under a redwood in the forest outside of Vancouver.  
  
Castiel answers Sam’s call, a feeble, confused message about a hunt gone wrong, and sees immediately that Sam won’t live. His rib cage is crushed, and he’s bleeding internally. Blood trickles slowly from the corner of his mouth. Castiel’s first reaction is anger. Why hadn’t Sam gone to Ann Arbor when he’d first thought of it? Why did he have to be so careless, when he was so close to walking away? But that kind of thinking is futile, now.  
  
He kneels next to Sam in the snow, and checks his pulse. It tells Castiel nothing that he doesn’t already know, but it’s a human gesture of care, and it’s the only thing that he can think to do.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he is. So terribly sorry. Even he can’t count the humans that he’s healed, humans who meant nothing to him, whose faces blur together into an endless stream of professional obligation. He would gladly let a thousand of them die to save this one man. But he can’t. Not even Heaven’s power was strong enough to interfere with the decree of Death. Castiel can do nothing.  
  
“I can remove the tree,” he says. “I believe it would be quicker, then.” It’s the only mercy he can give.  
  
Sam spasms, and tries futilely to sit up. Castiel holds him down, trying to stop him from hurting himself further.  
  
“Dean,” Sam chokes out through the blood in his mouth, when he’s able to talk. Of course, Sam would want to see his brother at the end. Castiel should have thought of it himself.  
  
Sam’s breathing is a desperate death rattle, his lungs half-full of blood already. Castiel takes off his trench coat and folds it. He slides it carefully under Sam’s head, lifting him out of the snow. He brushes a wet strand of hair out of Sam’s face, and in that touch, eases slightly the pressure in his chest. Not enough to save him, but enough to buy him a few minutes. Enough for Dean.  
  
He rises to go, then, but he hesitates, and stops to look at Sam, one last time. It’s not as if Castiel is unfamiliar with death, but he’s lived the vast majority of his long life far from its reach. How can it be that the man who beat the devil is going to be killed by a tree? It seems impossible that something as important as Sam can be stopped by something as stupid as this. It hits him that Sam will never get to see the new season of Doctor Who. He’d been so excited.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Castiel says again. It feels like they’re the only words he’s had to say to anyone for years. He’s never felt more useless. He’s an angel. If he can’t help, or serve, or guard, then he doesn’t know why he’s still alive.  
  
He puts on his angelic detachment like armor–that, at least, is something that he can do–and goes to find Dean.  
  
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  
  
When he’s brought Dean to Sam, Castiel walks away, out of earshot, to give them privacy. He could still eavesdrop if he wanted to, of course, but he doesn’t. All these years, Sam has longed to have Dean to himself. Castiel can give him that for the next ten minutes.  
  
He only returns when he hears Dean call his name. Dean’s eyes are red, but he’s not crying. His jaw is set and his back is locked straight, his body a cage to hold in pain.  
  
“Help me get this off him,” Dean says, gesturing to the tree. “We need to burn the body.”  
  
Castiel could lift the tree one-handed, or wish it out of existence. But he senses that Dean needs to feel that he’s the one collecting Sam, so he lets Dean take part of the tree’s weight as they drag it out of the way. Sam’s clothes hide the worst of the damage, but he still looks like he’s been ground into the snow, a half crushed insect. The sight means little to Castiel–a body without a soul is just meat–but Dean gives a half-choked sob and walks off into woods abruptly.  
  
Castiel wonders whether it would be best if he put the body in the Impala himself, and spared Dean further grief, but just as he bends to pick it up, Dean doubles back.  
  
“I’ve got it,” Dean says, but he doesn’t. Sam was a big man, much bigger than Dean. It takes both of them to lay him out in the back seat, but they manage it. Dean leans against the side of the Impala afterwards, as if he’s gathering strength from it, and stares off into the middle distance. Castiel doesn’t know what to do.  
  
“Do you want me to. . . ?” He trails off, unsure how to finish.  
  
“No. I need to be alone,” Dean says.  
  
Castiel disappears, then, but he doesn’t leave. He rides shotgun, unseen, for the next two hundred miles. When he feels certain that Dean isn’t planning to eat his gun, or drive the car off a bridge, he reaches back, and pulls the tracking device out from beneath the green toy soldier that’s been jammed into the armrest in the backseat. It was the one place that he’d known Dean would never disturb, no matter many times he overhauled the Impala.  
  
Dean smells like pine sap and Sam’s blood. Castiel looks at him one last time, this man that he betrayed Heaven for, killed his brothers for, believed in free will for. Castiel never turned human, as he’d once feared, but Dean has dragged him down into the world of change and death, just the same. Castiel can never again be who he was before they met, a being that was whole, and righteous, and unmoved, and he doesn’t know if the right response is “Thank you,” or “fuck you.”  
  
It hardly matters, anymore. The time has passed to say either one. There are so many things that he never said, to both of them. He doesn’t know if that means that he failed them in some fundamental way, or if this is just how it is when you live among creatures so brief. He wants to say to Dean that Sam is in Heaven, and that Dean will join him, one day, and the brothers will finally be together, as they were always meant to be. He wants to say ‘ _I love you_.’ Above all, he wants to say ‘ _I’m so, so sorry_.’ Instead, he pockets the tracking device and sets Dean free.  
  
A poor farmer in Brazil burns an acre of rainforest to create farmland that will be exhausted by the season’s end. Maybe Castiel will go home, and wait for the rising tide of change to wash him away. A little girl in Battle Creek pushes her friends on a merry-go-round. Maybe he’ll retire, after all, and walk among the stars of a distant galaxy for what’s left of eternity, far from the beautiful strife of the living. A nineteen-year-old hunter in Pittsburgh is about to be killed by a poltergeist. Maybe he’ll spin the wheel again.  
  
  



End file.
